Anglican Values 8: The Daily Office

Anglican Values 8: The Daily Office
February, 2000

Sometimes people ask me, What is distinctive about the Episcopal Church? So much seems similar to what others do - our Sunday service, form of church government, forms of private prayer, are all shared with or similar to what others do. But there is one uniquely Anglican form.

It is called the Daily Office, a forbiddingly bureaucratic title which might better be Daily Scriptural Prayer. It is the basic, fundamental form of prayer in our tradition. In its simplest form it consists of reading psalms and Bible lessons in the morning and evening every day. Nothing very special in that - except that Anglicans have evolved a unique format for this kind of prayer over our 450 plus years as a worshiping community.

The Daily Office has its roots in synagogue practice, in which men would gather and read the scriptures each day at a stated time. Early Christians continued this practice. When the monastic movement arose in the 200's and 300's, the monks and nuns would memorize the psalms and often would recite all 150 every day. When St. Benedict wrote his Rule for monks in the early 500's he arranged the psalms and scripture in eight services each day, saying the whole
Psalter every week. The Benedictine arrangement became the pattern for Christian scriptural prayer for the next 1000 years, becoming very complex with the addition of saints days, seasonal variations, hymns, and music.

One of the main agendas of the Reformation was to make Bible reading central to the prayer life of ordinary people. It was the genius of Thomas Cranmer, who produced the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, to turn the eight daily monastic services into a twice a day format. The psalms were divided into a monthly cycle and the Bible was read through in course, a chapter from the Old and New Testaments twice a day. The new form, called Morning and Evening Prayer, was required to be said by the clergy in the Church every day, and recommended to the laity. It rapidly became the most important part of Anglican worship, supplanting the Eucharist as the main Sunday service in most places.

The Book of Common Prayer set out the readings for each day, and devout lay people as well as clergy soon made it the basis of their devotions. Countless millions of people over the years have started and ended the day with these services, often in family prayer at home. Its use led directly to the Anglican approach to Scripture. It works against a piety resting on proof-texted theological propositions, since a faithful user of this form of prayer will read the whole Bible through many times in a lifetime of devotion and become aware of the rich dialogues among Biblical theologies in that enormously complex library of holy writings.

[Note: This short essay was followed by a detailed and date-specific way to use the Daily Office, which is omitted here.]